@MinuteEarth

If you're interested in seeing how the sausage is made here at MinuteEarth, become our Patreon or member on YouTube! Just visit https://www.patreon.com/MinuteEarth or click "JOIN". Thanks!

@lonelyPorterCH

I could think of many things:
- their diet is too expensive
- you cannot herd them
- they might attack you
- they are probably territorial, no chance of having lots of them in a small area

@imveryangryitsnotbutter

CGP Grey summarized it best: "Ten pounds of grass make a pound of cow, and ten pounds of cow make a pound of tiger. But cow and tiger have the same amount of calories, so you might as well just eat the cow."

@ommin202

For most of human history, eating a carnivore would've just been HARD. Why fight a bear for it's meat when you could hunt a deer, where you'd be less likely to get injured and die? Then as a course, we'd never develop the taste/immune system/etc. for eating predators.

@mantellim5489

Carnivores dont primarily eat carnivores either, with the exception of fish

@AM-uk7jv

Conversely for seafood, we humans predominantly eat carnivorous fish, while we rarely eat herbivorous fish. Herbivore fish taste like the plants they eat. Which isn't good.

@RustedCrown11

i find it really funny you use an aligator in a farm as an example of "we don't farm carnivores" when infact we litterally have aligator farms for their meat in Louisiana

N/A

I'll add another possible reason: humans used to be hunter-gatherers, and hunting a carnivore probably was way too dangerous to be worth the effort

@luke8857

This question is obvious. We just don't raise carnivores to eat because you end up raising something like goats or chicken to feed them and it defeats the whole purpose of raising the carnivore for food.

@fabiobeka

I'm no expert but hunting or herding tigers seems a lot harder then hunting or herding rabbits.

@Rafael-c9c

You are not even considering that hunting a deer is significantly easier than hunting a cougar

@JanSenCheng

I think you kinda missed what's imo the big one: we don't just eat herbivores, we specifically eat ruminants and fowl (and pork, which is also the most common meat, but I'll get back to that), which are animals that eat grass and seeds. Specifically, those are things that human derive little to no nutrition from, but are incredibly abundant. For most of human history (really, all of it prior to the Second Agricultural Revolution), we didn't grow food to feed animals, we just let them graze on otherwise unused grassland or hay, which is effectively a byproduct of the grains we actually eat. As such, they were basically a way of converting inedible plant matter into stuff we can actually eat. 

Pigs are the big exception to that, in that they don't eat grasses primarily. However, they do eat anything. All of the waste and scraps that get produced by people can be fed to pigs, and they'll also happily find food in an otherwise barren field. 

Basically, the reason we eat those animals primarily is just because those animals were effectively no-effort food sources at a time when food production was the vast majority of human labour.

@a1tech11

More prey species than predators in the wild. Eating predators would simply drive many species into extinction. Many Apex predators are on conservation list.

@peacefulinvasion684

The real reason is that once we started farming our food, we went for the meat that was easy to raise. That cow is huge, takes less resources to produce, and won't turn you to food. 

Lions are big enough to feed a village, however theyre expensive to feed and would gladly have you for supper.

@Krypto137

A point about the inefficiency of cows, though, which I think is important to point out 

Historically, raising cattle (not just cows but sheep and goats too) was done in areas where it was hard to grow crops, but where grass grew readily. Humans can't eat grass, so it was an easy way to turn inedible calories into edible ones. It didn't matter that it took 10000 calories of grass to make 1000 calories of cow because those 10000 calories of grass were useless to us. It wasn't that different from the fish example. 

Then we started growing crops to feed the cattle tho, which kind of defeats the purpose of having the cattle in the first place. But originally at least, it made perfect sense.

@copium7845

my theory is back in the days we had animals at farms. Its easier to find grass for a cow than there is to find 800 rabbits for a wolf...

@zsarke2450

Australia markets croc meat. Both grain fed and meat fed. Croc meat changes colour, texture and flavour depending on what it was fed

@maheshwarannarayanan

Back in the old days, carnivores were harder to hunt and the reward to risk ratio was not worth it, in the present times, it is very difficult and inefficient to grow carnivores for food, so it is highly practical to eat herbivores

@brianedwards7142

I read this morning of a croc that was shot because it was stalking people and eating dogs. The body was donated to the local aboriginal community who held a feast.

@robertmcauslan6191

This is more “why we don’t farm carnivores” more so than “why we don’t eat carnivores”. We eat plenty of carnivores but farm very little of them.